I hereby award the World War II drama “The Great Raid” a Cement Star for faithful and distinguished service to the cause of mediocrity.

The script, about a 1945 rescue mission to free American GI’s scheduled for mass execution at a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines, is presented with a Sharpshooter badge for firing off deadly clichés at 100 rounds per minute.

Special citations go to the following lines: “There’s not another group of men in this or any other army I’d sooner trust my life with.” “We were going to rescue them, or die trying.” “You gotta pull through this, pal. Just think of everything you got to look forward to.”

Director John Dahl is presented with the Misunderstanding of the Service Medal for his stalwart mangling of Army custom. Dahl places his GI’s in pretty little hairdos (one actor has bangs down to his eyes, which suggests less a trained killing machine than a member of Jimmy Eat World) and is unaware that when two officers walk together, the senior officer must be on the right. He also allows one soldier to say, “We’ll be ready to report to you at 0800 hours in the morning.” As opposed to 0800 hours in the evening?

Benjamin Bratt and James Franco, as Rangers leading the rescue, are awarded the Order of the Quagmire in recognition of their total inability to move their careers forward. Bratt attempts to sound tough by randomly inserting the phrase “son of a bitch” into his remarks, and Franco mumbles bland narration seemingly cribbed from the World Book Encyclopedia (“Manila was considered the Pearl of the Orient”).

The foreign nationals Joseph Fiennes (a Briton) and Marton Csokas (a New Zealander), who play Yankee POW’s, are ineligible for American citations and should not be in this picture in the first place. They nonetheless receive the Legion d’Erreur, both for their unstinting fidelity to a single pained facial expression in pursuit of the idea of noble suffering and for their courageous attempts to sound American by sl-o-o-o-o-wly picking their way through each sentence as though negotiating a mine field.

The Bleeding Heart of Irrelevance is presented to the character of Margaret (Connie Nielsen), a nurse in faraway Manila. Smuggling quinine to the troops and emerging from a torture session with a bright coat of lipstick as though her Japanese captors furnished her with cosmetics as well as beatings, she nevertheless has nothing to do with the raid. Her enlistment in this campaign is an honorable yet hopeless sacrifice to the lost cause of enticing women to buy tickets.